Martin Espada, an outstanding poet in his own right, once told me that a poem should be portable. That is, when a reader encounters it, he or she should be able to instinctively feel not only what the words mean, but also how the poet would want it to be read. I’ve always mulled this sentiment over in my mind, wondering to what extent Professor Espada could have meant for a poem to be portable.

Wallace Stevens, perhaps more than any other poet, has taught me (threatened me with?) the fine line between portability and obscurity. He expresses both fluently in his works; reading them once, twice, or even fifty times, may never suffice. I spent two weeks attempting to make this recording, re-taking the vocals over forty times before I felt somewhat encouraged by the result. Because it is a short poem, I wanted to read it through on one take. I found the third stanza to constantly be the most challenging point of the poem. Here is the full text:

The American Sublime

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

The American Sublime, like much of Stevens’ work, asserts the commonness of the individual and the imcomprehensibilty of the whole. The poem opens with a question: How does one stand to behold the sublime? Based on this line, I decided that the poem had to be read standing; it seemed as though Stevens demanded so. After relating the power of the sublime in the second stanza - those civil acts that tear countries apart and yet, in the end, leave them together to deal with each other - Stevens begins the third stanza with another question: But how does one feel?

He is back where he started. The poet can speak of General Jackson and tell us that he stood, posed even, and beheld the sublime, knowing what it felt like. The poet, however, cannot channel these feelings; they belong only to General Jackson - to the individual. So he asks us: But how does one feel?

This line gave me trouble because I did not know where the stress in the sentence should lie. How? does? one? feel?

Read them:

How does one feel?
How does one feel?
How does one feel?
How does one feel?

In many of my early readings I stressed feel or does, without thinking about what I was doing. I listened back and it felt wrong. Every time.

It occured to me: How does one feel? In the end, General Jackson was only one. In his statue, the Confederate Army is clearly, almost aggressively, absent. He stands alone, Stonewall Jackson bronzed in time.

What is a general without his army? One. One man in the face of death, war, chaos, and the tides of history and politics. Like us, seperated only by degree and intensity.

‘How does one feel?’, thus, is a question posed to the individual, without whom the sublime would not exist. We face this sublime continuously; it is in our history, our fiber, our ideas - it creates our very personalities when it schools us from a precious age.

And confronted with that sublime, as we constantly are, what do we think about? We wonder, “What will I eat? What will I drink?” We feel hungry and thirsty. One feels hungry and thirsty. We hunger and thirst for great things and for base things. It is an inescabable part of our condition - to dream all afternoon of sensuousness, of making love with one’s spouse, then arriving at home to shoutingly ask, “What’s for dinner?” from the foyer, or genkan.

It turns out the poem was portable. The answer was right there: one. As I read the poem over and over, it struck me as odd that the word repeated so often. Master poets do not make mistakes, and so Stevens must have wanted us to hear it again and again. He was communicating something to us. He was showing us and telling us that the answer is one, and that if it sounds a bit odd, that’s ok. Individuals are a bit odd, by definition.

The Music

The background track is Ball and Biscuit by the White Stripes. Why?

The sublime is an infinite expression of one. The individual has a place in it, but would be nothing without it. Jack White understands the idiom of American music and carries that torch. In this work one hears the sublime heading back through Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker, to name a few. White positions himself inside this musical dialogue of the blues, one of the most important in all American culture, yet through his performance negates his self and becomes part of what those before him established. Like those before him, White is strongly one - he is an odd man with a unique personality that draws us in, holding up a mirror to reflect the details of our culture that we are too busy to take notice of.

It is homage, theivery and innovation all at once. It is to American music what Stevens was to American poetry: one person yelling and screaming against the sickness, madness, beauty and power of us all.

Listen Now:

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